The Vile Worm of the Eldritch Oak (Group One)

Deep within the forest, an ancient oak has grown huge, twisted, and evil. Ages ago, a savage cult
haunted these woods and this tree became the catalyst of their unspeakable rites. Below it they
carved out a chamber of sacrificial horror where innocent victims were offered to a hideous wormlike god. As the centuries passed, the cult faded into the mists of time, but the twisted old oak stood fast, awaiting the day when the creeping evil in the dark below would be summoned once more.

And so it happened that a crazed warrior, a savage berserker who spilled rivers of blood in the north of the world, came in his wanderings upon the great, brooding tree. In his madness he believed that the tree whispered to him, invited him, shared with him its dim secrets. Over the course of many years, the folk of the borderlands have come to know the old berserker as “the mad hermit of the woods.”